Urban Fantasy Author

Deleted interlude #1 – Shift happens

Let’s take the whole seeing-a-werewolf-in-the-backyard-at-three-a.m scenario a step further. Let’s assume that you resisted the impulse to run to the corner of your room and hyperventilate for a while, and instead you whipped out your cell phone or a digital camera that just happened to be lying around. Your device probably wouldn’t work because active magic generates a strong energy field. The same sensitivity that makes modern equipment capable of detecting energy disruptions makes it less capable of recording them in any tangible way. Ironically, an old fashioned flash camera has a better chance of recording the supernatural than a state of the art digital one.

But this isl hypothetical, so let’s ignore the odds and imagine that for some reason your recording device of choice works. Maybe the distance is just right, or maybe some other random atmospheric and technical factors line up perfectly. What are you going to do with that video? What reaction do you think you will get when you go to your sheriff, or a magazine editor, or the person who runs your local news station with the news that you have recorded a werewolf changing? How hard do you think it will be to even get someone official to look at your video, much less check it for signs of digital tampering?

But say you finally do get an expert to grudgingly agree to examine your video – that’s when you discover that computer imaging at the highest levels is like grammar or statistics or love – it has so many variables that people will find suggestive evidence of whatever they want to find if they look for it hard enough. And believe me, people will be looking for signs that your video has been tampered with very hard indeed…and your recording is of an event that was going on during major energy weirdness.

Still, as part of this mental exercise, let’s assume you are undaunted. Frustrated by how long it’s taking to get anyone to take you seriously, you go ahead and post your video on the internet. Congratulations! You’ve just joined the ranks of all the other con artists, pranksters, and delusional wack jobs who are already out there inundating the internet with photos, videos, eye witness accounts, and other paranormal post cards from la la land.

You know…the people you are ignoring right now.

If you really want to have fun, spend an afternoon on the internet looking up strange events witnessed by crowds of people and see how many of the stories are later attributed by experts to mass hysteria, the power of suggestion, optical illusions, food poisoning, virus outbreaks, drugs that were somehow publically disseminated without people’s knowledge, escaped weather balloons, exotic animals who somehow wound up running loose in urban areas thousands of miles away from their native jungles, strange perception altering gases escaping from nearby sewer systems or swamps, or…and this is my personal favorite….widespread conjunctivitis.

But…and now we’re really playing the long odds here…let’s say that after being ignored, suspected, ridiculed, disproven, and pitied, you still persevere. You remain a rational, persistent, and troublingly believable voice crying out your truth in the wilderness.

One day you will disappear. Maybe that disappearance will take the form of a suicide, or a murder, or a fire, or a car accident. Maybe you will be institutionalized. Maybe you will be hospitalized. Maybe you will simply vanish. However it happens, that will be the day when you have your final unwelcome revelation. The things that the Pax Arcana is hiding? They don’t want to be seen.